Disruptive Telephony

Today Alec Saunders posted a truly brilliant piece: Voice 3.0: The Emergence of the Voice Web. It's a much-needed update to his 2005 "Voice 2.0 Manifesto" and very nicely brings together much of the thinking about telecom today. (And yes, I had a chance to review it and provided feedback before it went live.)

It's brilliant. It's long. You really need to go and read it. It includes many of the themes we'll be talking about next week at eComm. It's right about so many things.

IT'S ALSO VERY WRONG.

The document as written has two big, glaring omissions.

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Voice Doesn't Matter... As Much

First off... the piece is all about voice. Which is great. But here's a reality check:

People do NOT want to communicate by ONLY voice.

I spend my day communicating with people all over the world... in pretty much constant "real-time" communication. But almost NONE of it is by voice.

Instead it is by IM... by Twitter... by Facebook... by SMS... even by email. All text-based mediums.

No voice.

Now occasionally I do actually speak with someone - and usually get startled when my phone or Skype actually rings. But the majority of my communication happens outside of voice.

I wrote about this evolution of communication four years ago ... and it has only continued to evolve to a situation where voice is only one of the available communication channels... and not even the primary communication channel.

I'd argue this trend is only going to continue. Voxeo commissioned some research by Opus Research a year ago where they surveyed consumer preference. The demographic shift is pretty clear in charts like this one:

Look at the purple bar for consumers aged 45-54 ... then look at the blue bar for consumers aged 18-24.

See the "wave"?

We live in a world of ubiquitous mobility ... a world where we use mobile devices accessing cloud-based services and interacting with social networks and other similar services.

Sometimes by voice.

So to Alec's three "Defining Themes", I would add a fourth theme of Voice 3.0, which is the rise of multi-channel communication and the evolution of voice to "just another channel".

In the new world of communication, it is about:

Enabling customers to connect with you in the channel of their choice.

All that Alec wrote about the other themes of Voice 3.0 will be true ... but merged into a broader context in which voice is simply one of the available communication channels. Alec writes:

The service package will include not just voice, but detailed statistics, group management controls, and more. And it will bristle with API’s that will enable an ecosystem of other players to be built around it.

I would argue that it is better stated:

The service package will include not just voice, but the ability to communicate across a wide variety of channels, supported by detailed statistics, group management controls, and more. And it will bristle with API’s that will enable an ecosystem of other players to be built around it.

Don't get me wrong... I'm not arguing that voice telephony will go away. It will be here with us probably forever. And there are certainly times when we need and want to use voice. But not always - and maybe not primarily.

"Voice 3.0" needs to recognize this evolution.

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Voice 3.0 Must Be Open

The second omission I see is perhaps more of a philosophical and personal one. I firmly believe that for voice to continue to be relevant and in fact to potentially grow in usage, Voice 3.0 must be based on open standards and not locking people in to specific services or providers.

Alec nails it with regard to the success of the Web (my emphasis added):

The web went from being a hyperlinked text library, to the largest programmable application on the planet, fuelled by open standards, lightweight communications infrastructure, standards which allowed content to be separated from logic and presentation, and an explosion of end-user devices, including today’s mobile devices.

He goes on to say:

Voice is on the cusp of the same revolution – a revolution that will be defined by letting the customer define the business logic of the application, not the service provider.

But then he doesn't quite bring it home. He says later again a similar thread (my emphasis added):

Ultimately, we’ll build systems where communications result in artefacts that can be consumed by services that have not been pre-specified. Think, for example, of the role that RSS played in the syndication of content, and imagine a similar world for voice. Tool chains will be created that will allow people to participate in building these services, and an explosion of new applications to consume these voice artefacts will be built.

The key here is that RSS is an open standard..

Alec in fact concludes with this (again, my emphasis added):

Network effects in the Voice 3.0 world become even more important. Will an open standard emerge? Although many die-hard networking folks would prefer that scenario, it’s hard to say. We may find ourselves in a world where a dominant proprietary player like Skype controls the platform, as a result of winning the race to build thriving developer ecosystems, and the applications that customers use and want.

Perhaps I am just part of the "die-hard networking folks", but I do believe that for voice to truly be integrated with the rest of the Web... for the "Voice Web" to emerge that Alec writes of in his title... for all the amazing new opportunities to emerge and "explode onto the scene"... for all of that to occur, Voice 3.0 needs to be based on open standards.

In fact, I would re-write his "web" paragraph with a voice spin:

Voice went from being an obscure medium locked up in proprietary/legacy telco control, to the largest programmable application on the planet, fueled by open standards, lightweight communications infrastructure, standards which allowed content to be separated from logic and presentation, and an explosion of end-user devices, including today’s mobile devices.

That is Voice 3.0.

And that is the fifth defining theme, being based on open standards that move control to the users and developers instead of the providers.

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Again, you NEED to read Alec's full Voice 3.0 piece. It's an outstanding piece that is very well done.

Despite what I've written here, I do believe Alec's piece gets it right... subject to my modifications. :-)

And then please add your view on this. Do you agree with me about these additions? Do you think I'm wrong? Please leave comments here - or write your own piece and leave a link here in the comments. Comment on Alec's piece... comment on Twitter or Facebook... talk to us at eComm next week...

Where do you see "Voice 3.0" going?

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Want to understand the history of Voice over IP (VoIP)? To learn about the various protocols and standards efforts that got us to where we are today?

Shawn Merdinger recently posted to the VOIPSEC mailing list the link to this Google Tech Talk back in August 2010 about the history of VoIP. The video runs close to 2 hours but provides a really good background in terms of the protocols and efforts starting with ARPA work back in the 1970's and moving up to today... well worth a viewing if you want to gain some historical context for where we are today.

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How does IPv6 impact telecommunications networks? How will IPv6 affect the SIP protocol? If you work in telecom, what should you be aware of with regard to IPv6? With World IPv6 Day only a week away, if you have been wondering about these kind of questions, please feel free to join me live in a free session hosted by the US Telecommunications Association:

IPv6 and Telecom Networks
Thursday, June 2, 2011
1:00pm US Eastern

Registration is free and if you are unable to attend it will be recorded for later viewing. (And if you register now, you'll be notified when the archive is available for viewing.) The description of the session is:

The networks that make up the Internet and IP communications are in the middle of a sea-change with the transition to IPv6. What impact will IPv6 have on telecom and communications networks?

Join USTelecom and Voxeo for a look at the various challenges that telecom and broadband services providers face in keeping their communication services working while transitioning to IPv6.

I'll be explaining briefly why there is all the attention on IPv6 then getting into the basics of IPv6 addressing. After a brief overview, I'll then dive into how IPv6 affects the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and get into some technical detail. I'll then wrap up with some resources about how to learn more and get started with IPv6 and finish with a Q&A session.

If you attended the Voxeo Developer Jam Session I presented back in May on IPv6, I'm going to be covering basically the same material although with a vendor-neutral perspective (i.e. I won't be explaining and demonstrating how Voxeo Prophecy and PRISM now natively support IPv6). Obviously the live Q&A session will be new, too, and I find the questions around IPv6 always quite fun to discuss.

Please feel free to join us at 1pm US Eastern tomorrow. Registration is free - and if you can't join live the session will be archived and available for viewing on US Telecom's website for 90 days. With World IPv6 Day coming up on June 8th, it's a great time to learn about what is going on with IPv6!

P.S. If you are interested in IPv6 in general, you may be interested in the IPv6 Resource Page I put together for Voxeo at:

http://bit.ly/voxeoipv6

Lots of good links to tutorials, VoIP resources and more...

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Fascinating stats out of an article at TheNextWeb this week:

China has become the first country to reach the 900 million mobile phone user milestone after amassing about 11 million mobile phone users in April alone, according to a report by the country’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

The report itself is available in Chinese. Looking at it via Google Translate did back up the numbers quoted in the article (assuming Google Translate was accurate).

By any measurement, 900 million is a staggering number of mobile phone users. TheNextWeb's article goes on to say that India is second worldwide with 811 million mobile phone users followed distantly by the US with 303 million users.

Said another way... China has almost 3 times as many mobile phone users as the US.

Consider, too, that China's population is 1.3 billion... and you have to imagine that like folks here in the US some % of people have multiple mobile phones... so there's obviously plenty of room to grow.

I found this intriguing from the article:

China’s 3G networks, which launched in 2009, are still used only by a small portion of the country’s total mobile phone populace. In April, China had a total of 67 million 3G users, which given the massive mobile subscriber base, is believed to have the potential to exceed the rest of the world.

Fascinating to see the growth there... and if you are providing services or apps to the mobile market, you obviously need to be paying attention to what is going on in China!

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Cool news from the good folks at Voxbone yesterday that they have been chosen by the U.N. to implement a new "888" country code for agencies offering disaster relief.

It's not clear from the news release exactly how this would work, but Alec Saunders spoke with Voxbone CEO yesterday and wrote this in a post:

As Ullens explained to me, +888 is a real country code assigned by the ITU to the UN. In cases of humanitarian need, where telephone systems may be inoperable because of natural disaster, the first teams on the ground would deploy a local GSM antenna, connected via satellite to the rest of the world. Then Voxbone would simply forward calls to the +888 country code via satellite to the local GSM station on the ground. The impact is that UN inter-agency, intra-agency, and external users will be able to dial a +888 number assigned to a relief agency from anywhere in the world, and be immediately connected to that relief agency in the field, in whatever country being served. Not only that, the numbers need never change. Relief staff will be reachable on the same numbers in whatever location they are currently assigned.

If this sounds somewhat familiar, Voxbone was the company behind rolling out the iNum country code of +883 back in 2008 (see my video interview with Rod Ullens from that time), which is designed to be a "global" country code that people could call from anywhere. (You can learn more about iNum's recent activity by listening to a January 2011 VUC interview with Voxbone.)

Congrats to Voxbone and the United Nations on this agreement and I look forward to seeing this effort get deployed!

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Mitel today announced a series of organizational changes, including the departure of Paul Butcher, Mitel's President and Chief Operating Officer. The news release indicates they are merging together various sales organizations and simplifying the business units into three:

• Mitel Communications Solutions: responsible for delivering unified communications and collaboration products and services to businesses.
• Mitel NetSolutions: responsible for network and hosted services, mobile services, and broadband connectivity.
• Mitel DataNet: responsible for the distribution of third-party products to partners and customers.

It also briefly mentions the departure of Paul Butcher as of Saturday. From a product point-of-view, there were two statements I found interesting:

• "a re-direction of our R&D investment to products serving the high-growth market of 100 to 2,500 user organizations." Which makes sense, given that this area is one in which Mitel has traditionally done well.
  
  
• "we intend to exploit our significant market leadership in voice virtualization." i.e. continuing their partnership with VMware. Again this also makes sense given that people are looking for solutions to deploy more applications with less hardware... and looking at virtualization as one of the potential solutions.

To me, all of this is naturally to be expected after Mitel appointed Richard McBee the new CEO back in January 2011. A new CEO comes in and he'll listen for a few months... and then start making changes. Obviously this is his reshaping the organization in the way he thinks it should go.

In that vein, the departure of Paul Butcher is not surprising. Paul had been in the CxO part of Mitel since 2001, coming in at the time when Terry Matthews bought the company back and launched it on its current course. Over that time he was quite involved in many aspects of the company and worked quite a bit with the now-retired CEO Don Smith. With a re-org of this magnitude and with a new CEO wanting to reshape the organization, it's not surprising that some of the previous leadership would leave. I wish Paul well with whatever comes next.

I wish Mitel well, too. I haven't been writing about Mitel all that much lately, but that's more because my own interests are no longer as much with the IP-PBX space that Mitel plays in. If you look at my recent writing, it's mostly been about SIP, Skype, mobile devices... with a handful of IPv6, Voxeo and other topics thrown in. I haven't been really writing about any of the IP-PBX and Unified Communications vendors for a while.

Regardless, I wish them well... though I only recognized a couple of the names in the news release and much has changed since I left Mitel back in 2007, I still have good friends working there and Mitel still has outstanding technology. Their challenge has always been around getting that story out to the larger world. Perhaps these changes will help. We'll see.

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Multiple people have pinged me asking if I was going to weigh in on the news last night that AT&T is acquiring T-Mobile USA.

Seriously?

It's been ages since I've seen this kind of online and offline media feeding frenzy[1] ... I mean, look at Techmeme this morning:

Pretty much everybody and anybody who writes online with anything remotely to do with communications has generated posts on the topic.

I think at this point all we can really do is watch what the regulators say... and realize that this will take a year or more to actually happen. I'll perhaps have more to say at some future time, but right now I'm just reading Om and all the many other comments out there...

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[1] Well, okay, maybe we haven't seen this kind of media feeding frency since, oh, the iPad2 launch ;-)

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Is Nokia about to drop its entire mobile platform for Android or Windows Phone 7? Yesterday the buzz in the telecom space was all about an apparent memo to employees from Nokia CEO Stephen Elop that said Nokia was on a "burning platform" and needed to make some hard choices. The text of the memo, which Engadget has in full, is brilliantly written. The metaphor of the worker on a burning oil platform is well done... and I expect we'll hear more usage of that in the future by others.

The memo is also a very well done and brutally honest assessment of where Nokia stands in the mobile market and where the competition sits. What I found most compelling, though, was the commentary around the "war of ecosystems" (my emphasis added):

The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, ecommerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things. Our competitors aren't taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we're going to have to decide how we either build, catalyse or join an ecosystem.

We ARE in a "war of ecosystems". No one can doubt that.

On a macro level it is Apple iOS versus Google Android, with Microsoft attempting to have some relevance with Windows Phone 7.

RIM would very much like to still be in the game with its Blackberry OS, but recent surveys don't bode well (66% of Verizon Blackberry users said they would likely move to the iPhone). HP would like to think it can be a player with WebOS (and is making a "big announcement" today) but that seriously remains to be seen. And Symbian? Well... read the Nokia CEO's letter...

The "war of ecosystems" is MUCH broader than the mobile market, of course... it's a war going on across the telecommunications and computer industry in general. It involves so many others, too, like Facebook and Twitter and everyone else in the "social" space...

It's a war around who can attract the most developers to build the most applications on a "platform"... it's a war around "open" versus "closed" ... around "simplicity" and "features"... around "applications" and "big, fat, dumb, pipes"... around "APIs"... around who can be our "portal" for communications ... about how can get the eyeballs...

It's a war for the future of our communications....

... and it's ALL about the ecosystems!

Who will survive?

That story is still being written... it's an exciting time... but a crazy, chaotic time, too...

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P.S. Engadget is now saying this memo/letter is true based on multiple sources... and I'm inclined to believe it. From a PR point-of-view, it's a brilliant move to hype and tease about Nokia's announcement on Friday. Many people - myself included - probably had no idea that Nokia was going to be making a huge announcement on Friday.

Well played, Nokia. You got our attention.

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For those of us who have been around the "VoIP industry" for some time now, the "VON Conferences" put on by Jeff Pulver were the place to be in the early days of VoIP. We were all mostly early adopters and embraced with enthusiasm this idea of sending voice and later video over the IP networks... there was a real community of both attendees and speakers... all of us chasing that vision of real-time communications over the Internet and other IP networks.

"VON" as a name continued to morph and evolve... it became a series of conferences... the "V" included "video"... it spawned the VON Coalition on public policy issues... Jeff and his Pulvermedia team launched "VON Magazine", issues of which can still be found online in some places... www.von.com became a media hub around VoIP issues... "VON" became many things...

And then it all ended in early 2008 with Pulvermedia's investors seizing assets and then with Jeff's resignation. Fast forward to December 2008 and the VON brand was reborn through Virgo Publishing. I and many others wondered if Virgo could recapture and rebuild the VON community. They tried. They had a VON conference in 2009 (and I was a speaker there). They seemed to try a bit with online content.

But it never really worked. Times had changed... the industry had evolved. "VoIP" and even video are now mainstream and no longer solely the province of early adopters. Voice/video communication is not the only way we communicate... social media, in particular, as well as mobile communications and apps have changed what we do. While the conference industry in general declined, too, new conferences emerged, with many early adopters joining events like eComm or Jeff's own #140conf events... or the myriad of "____Camp" events happening on a smaller scale all over the world.

Virgo Publishing subsequently cancelled the VON 2010 show to focus on online content...

... and now, as of Monday, January 17, they've killed the VON name. Henceforth, all the VON URLs and content are under the "vision2mobile" brand. They provide a rationale which sounds reasonable on some level.

Still, for those of us who been in this industry for a while, it is sad to see the passing of the "VON" name, even though in many ways "VON" died a few years back.

R.I.P., VON... it was great to know you!

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The phone on my desk rang a second time today. I glanced at the console, didn't recognize the Caller ID and simply ignored the call. A minute or two later a text message buzzed on my iPhone with a transcription of the voicemail left by the caller. I took one look and knew right away:

Yep, another telemarketer!

Just like another call earlier today. As I did my little glance-ignore-wait-for-text-message routine I realized yet again how my communications channels have changed over the years. Here is the reality:

I pretty much NEVER answer my desk phone.

Why not? Pretty simple, really:

The people who I want to speak with already know how to get in touch with me!

And the "how" comes down to: unified communications and mobile.

Unified Communications

For instance, we're huge users of Skype internally at Voxeo. I have everyone in the company as a contact, and am in a zillion various group chats with internal employees. If someone within the company wants to reach me, they will:

• Check my presence on Skype. Am I online? If so, am I "away"? or "busy/Do Not Disturb"?
  
  
• Send me an IM - asking if they can call me if it's urgent.

Note that second bullet... internal communication starts in IM and then migrates to voice and possibly video if our conversation needs to be "higher bandwidth" than typing.

I can't honestly remember the last time someone internally actually rang my desk phone, because, if I'm not online, there's also...

Mobile

If I'm not online, or if it's urgent, people know to call me on my mobile phone. I carry it basically everywhere. And whether they dial that direct number or they call my Google Voice number that rings that phone... either way they reach me on my mobile.

It's Not Just Internal

Most of the people who I regularly want to talk to outside my company are also linked to me via Skype or one of the other IM networks (and mostly via Skype) or social networks. Or they have my mobile number. Possibly we've connected via some other way... email... Twitter... Facebook... and if we need to go to voice, we've exchanged mobile phone numbers... or we'll use an app in one of the social services (like Facebook Telephone or Twelephone) that connects us via voice through that service. They don't call my desk phone.

Which Leaves the Desk Phone For What?

Spam! Er... "telemarketing calls". Usually from someone trying to sell me some service that will magically generate millions of leads... or giving me a "personal invitation" to some event. Randomly there might be someone out there who I actually want to speak with - my deskphone number is on my business card, after all - and if so I will definitely return the call after I see the voicemail transcription.

Otherwise... it just sits there as a number out there to attract telemarketers...

How about you? Do you answer your desk phone much any more? Do people actually call you on it?

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